


You Make Me Better

by Aduuuh



Category: Elementary (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-10
Packaged: 2018-02-28 21:41:15
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,190
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2748086
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aduuuh/pseuds/Aduuuh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Oneshots focused on Sherlock and Joan's relationship inspired by quotes in the show.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You Make Me Better

"It just so happens that people, in all their deceits and delusions that inform everything they do, tend to be the most fascinating puzzles of all."

She deceived herself.

She was deluded.

She was fascinating. And he found that he needed to understand her. Of course, he usually felt that way. It was a bad habit of his to always try to understand people.

If he didn't, he wouldn't have such an easy time solving cases. People were puzzles just like murders were, after all. They were just better disguised, with faces, bodies, lips the color of strawberries that pursed when he offended her...

 _No_. He had noticed this happening more and more often lately. He would get sidetracked by her physical qualities, even when what drew him in was her analytical mind, gradually becoming as trained as his. She refined herself under his tutelage, and he watched her mind flower as she became more able to see the patterns that made up the world around them. He thought it unlikely that she would move through the world as he did, though. She had not grown up seeing everything that everyone did, the little lies that they told themselves when they didn't like the truth. Or even when they just didn't see the truth, too wrapped up in their fantasies to understand there was something more, truth that did not change no matter how much fantasy their minds produced.

Watson, though, had gradually come to see through the cases she was coaxed into attempting alone that no matter what you wanted to be true did not actually change whatever had happened. An investigator must be impartial at all times! Especially when the killer was still on the loose, and convincing yourself of something that had never actually happened would mean that they could and would kill again. Watson had felt the same pressure to be true to the world that he felt since he was six, when he first realized what it meant that reality would not be changed by what he wanted. It was reinforced again and again - bullies wouldn't leave just because he wanted them to, no matter how much he pretended they weren't beating him. He still had the bruises afterwards.

But his wanting things did change something - one small part of reality he had some modicum of control over - himself.

And because he disliked the bullies, wanted them to stop harassing him, he found his own way to fight back. He picked apart their brains and laid them bare in front of them - it wasn't hard. Their brains weren't particularly complicated, not at their age and maybe not ever. They did understand when they were being mocked, though, and when passersby snickered at them their tempers would flare and he would just be beaten worse the next time.

That never stopped him, despite it never preventing them from beating him. It proved to give him some strange satisfaction. The way he could control their actions with words... admittedly, never to stop beating him. Not until he and they understood blackmail.

But those incidents had always left him with the knowledge that if he wanted something, he had to change himself in a way that would get him what the wanted, and that the only way he could know how to change himself was to understand what they wanted how they tried to get it. And so he studied those around him, and grew to love the many and varied ways they differed in their reactions to things, and the way they were the same, and the way if he smiled at them in a certain way and did things for them at the right times, they would do things for HIM when he needed them to.

Girls, he had noticed, were often far more skilled in "solving people" - and so he had studied their interactions more than men. They were more complicated in the way they acted around each other, for they each saw each other and knew they saw each other - on some level anyway. They certainly acted like they did, even if they never explicitly thought it. So it should come as no surprise to him that Watson picked up on how to begin solving people faster than he did - hell, part of the reason he feared the "Deductionist" was simply because she was a woman, and that made her likely in some ways to be right.

Of course, he still didn't worry until he saw that she had been right about his struggles with addiction.

He should never have told her about when he manipulated the bullies into beating him even harder, but she had asked about his childhood, and he hadn't seen a reason not to.

Watson wouldn't do that though, he had seen her character and besides the only times she was even slightly less than supportive were when he was trying to bottle things in. She said it was unhealthy - and he knew it was, of course, there were studies and he had read the results and committed them to memory. Without that push, though, he was so much slower about it.

She made him better. And he would get there eventually, of course - most of the time, at least. But with her, he got there faster - that was why they worked so well as partners. He still wasn't sure if he had the same effect on her, but hopefully she still benefited from his knowledge. He hadn't managed to teach her everything he knew, quite yet. ...Someday, she would know everything he would, and he hoped that she'd find him still useful.

She wouldn't leave him, he knew that. She didn't look at things and people with the same awareness of utility he sometimes did. Yet, he still wanted to be useful. That was what friends did, though they never really looked at it that way.

That was how all relationships worked - trading, sharing. Eventually, shared goals. Shared happiness, sadness, laughter.

Shared pleasure.

He wanted to give her pleasure. She was so helpful, so useful, had helped him through such an emotionally vulnerable point in his life that she had become his friend. Not easily, not naturally - she had been paid to be near him - but she was most definitely his friend now, no matter how much he exasperated her.

He had suspected some small ways to bring her pleasure - spending time with her regularly, not as part of solving a case but solely as time meant for them and whatever thoughts came into their heads at the time. Bringing her little gifts - nothing relationshippy, just things that let her know he was thinking of her.

He didn't know if she had caught on yet. He hadn't solved enough of her to know that. He would, though - he always got there in the end.

And yet... If he were entirely, totally honest with himself... well, she made him _better_. She would probably know what needed to be done about this, if indeed anything need be done.

But how best to approach her?

He would have to think about this.


End file.
